{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
